Skip to content

Commit

Permalink
x86/boot: Fail the boot if !M486 and CPUID is missing
Browse files Browse the repository at this point in the history
Linux will have all kinds of sporadic problems on systems that don't
have the CPUID instruction unless CONFIG_M486=y.  In particular,
sync_core() will explode.

I believe that these kernels had a better chance of working before
commit 05fb3c1 ("x86/boot: Initialize FPU and X86_FEATURE_ALWAYS
even if we don't have CPUID").  That commit inadvertently fixed a
serious bug: we used to fail to detect the FPU if CPUID wasn't
present.  Because we also used to forget to set X86_FEATURE_ALWAYS, we
end up with no cpu feature bits set at all.  This meant that
alternative patching didn't do anything and, if paravirt was disabled,
we could plausibly finish the entire boot process without calling
sync_core().

Rather than trying to work around these issues, just have the kernel
fail loudly if it's running on a CPUID-less 486, doesn't have CPUID,
and doesn't have CONFIG_M486 set.

Reported-by: Matthew Whitehead <tedheadster@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>
Cc: Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>
Cc: Brian Gerst <brgerst@gmail.com>
Cc: Denys Vlasenko <dvlasenk@redhat.com>
Cc: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@redhat.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/70eac6639f23df8be5fe03fa1984aedd5d40077a.1479598603.git.luto@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
  • Loading branch information
Andy Lutomirski authored and Ingo Molnar committed Nov 21, 2016
1 parent fc0e81b commit ed68d7e
Showing 1 changed file with 6 additions and 0 deletions.
6 changes: 6 additions & 0 deletions arch/x86/boot/cpu.c
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -87,6 +87,12 @@ int validate_cpu(void)
return -1;
}

if (CONFIG_X86_MINIMUM_CPU_FAMILY <= 4 && !IS_ENABLED(CONFIG_M486) &&
!has_eflag(X86_EFLAGS_ID)) {
printf("This kernel requires a CPU with the CPUID instruction. Build with CONFIG_M486=y to run on this CPU.\n");
return -1;
}

if (err_flags) {
puts("This kernel requires the following features "
"not present on the CPU:\n");
Expand Down

0 comments on commit ed68d7e

Please sign in to comment.